The Crucial Interventions
would the governments the party controls at the centre and the states be able to focus single-mindedly on the coronavirus crisis, which is a crisis of global dimensions? Future ambition that subverts and undermines present governance can be as deadly in their consequences as viral attacks on a polity.
Again, Asiwaju’s analogy is not relevant to the APC alone. How do we explain a situation, for instance, where the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), driven by ambition and partisan political considerations decided to hold political events with large crowds both in Ibadan and Port Harcourt at this period of virtual national emergency? That again shows how blind desperation for power for its own sake can, like a virus, rid a polity of its immunity with disastrous consequences.
Asiwaju said those who engaged, in the distracting politics of seeking to remove the APC Chairman at this time were allowing their ambition to jeopardize the public good. Thus, he wondered why people were already entangled in the succession battle that is three years away rather than helping President Buhari to deliver on his mandate.
This is how he succinctly put it that members of the party “should be trying their best to help the president. Instead of seeing President Buhari as our present leader and commander-in-chief, their sole contemplation is upon his eventual exit. Yet, not even a full year has passed since his second inaugural. How can they be committed to helping him realise his mandate when the fullness of their gaze is affixed to seizing this very mandate for themselves?”
Those touched by the malady, theAPC leader urged to tell the time and discern the difference between the present and the future and the imperatives of the very season our nation finds itself, saying the party was not built simply as a vehicle for personal ambition. “We built the party because we saw it as perhaps the only enduring hope to bring progressive governance to this nation.”
The truth is that if ceaseless politicking from one election cycle to another marginalizes and undermines good and effective governance, and thus makes it impossible for the ruling party to fulfil its promises to the people, how will the party be able to face the electorate in the next election with any confidence? If politicians are preoccupied with elections that are still three years away now to the detriment of impactful and productive governance that the mandate of the ruling party demands, are they not creating the conditions for the non-realization of such ambitions if their party is unable to showcase a record of high performance to the electorate?
By the quality and incisiveness of his interventions in public discourse, which is akin to those of the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, for example,Asiwaju is demonstrating, once again, that politics is not just about intrigues and jostling for office, it is also, perhaps more importantly, about thinking deeply and rigorously about public issues and intervening in such a way as to elevate public discourse and impact public policy positively.
On the occasion of his 68th birthday tomorrow, I join the teeming admirers in wishingAsiwaju happy birthday and many years of patriotic service to Nigeria and humanity.